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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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"I think religions all go to the same path, you
know I think it’s all religions are a way of how to live your life and they all
kinda lead to the same goal" (145). Thus did one young American recently
express a bedrock principle of liberal Protestantism—the conviction that
beneath the formalities of “organized religion” lies a natural substratum of
human yearning and experience, one common to all the major spiritual
traditions. This breezy description of religious equivalency represents one of
many voices captured in Christian Smith’s Souls in Transition (2009), a
magisterial study of the religious lives of college-aged, or “emerging,” adults
in the United States. At first glance, the results of Smith’s survey might seem
to confirm media reports that church affiliation is inexorably declining
because young adults are “spiritual” not “religious.” Ironically, one of the
interviewees acknowledged the trendiness of this way of framing things: “I’m
spiritual, yes, which is now starting to sound like a cliché....” (159).

However,
the widespread use of such language represents more than a simple fading away
of organized religion. Indeed, the great accomplishment of Smith’s book—and of
several other recent studies—is to show just how historically contingent is the
individualism, moral relativism, and therapeutic consumerism of mainstream
American culture. A vague, inchoate “spirituality” is not something natural
that remains once religion has retreated. Our current religious settlement is
not the inevitable outcome toward which previous history tended. Rather, it is
a product of particular ways that generations of men and women have chosen to
talk about their own lives—to frame them morally and theologically.

Those
seeking resources to understand the historical forces and intellectual premises
behind the contemporary framing of religion need not search for long. Critical
accounts of contemporary assumptions about belief have been pouring off the
presses in the past decade. Many of these studies share a suspicion of what
Charles Taylor has called the “subtraction” story of secularization—an account
that assumes that the secular is what remains after all that is historically contingent
(and therefore unscientific or parochial or obsolete) has fallen away.In various ways, these six recent books
reject the premise that American politics and culture are neutral on matters of
religion. They argue that it is arbitrary and coercive to exclude religion from
the academy or to deprive young men and women of sophisticated resources for
thinking about their spiritual lives.

The
most notable re-evaluations of religion’s place in the modern world have been
big historical tomes. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) insists that
secularization is not primarily a matter of declining church attendance or
religious affiliation. Rather, the cultural frameworks within which individuals
and communities make sense of belief have themselves been radically
transformed. How did religion morph from a fact of life—something deeply
embedded in everyday experience—to a seemingly dispensable set of inwardly-held
beliefs? As Taylor rightly notes, many modern believers experience
secularization less as a loss of faith than as a recognition that their belief
is merely one option among many. Indeed, within a pluralistic culture, even
those who wish to preserve traditional ways of life, such as the Amish, will
seem to be exercising a form of individual freedom or personal preference.
Avoiding nostalgia for a lost past, Taylor recognizes that assumptions about
belief are rooted in pervasive social and cultural practices. His goal is not
to lament the loss of an irrecoverable past but rather to open up space for debate.
A Secular Age gently questions pervasive assumptions about religion by
showing the complex historical and moral reasons for their appeal. The
attraction of atheism, for instance, lies less in incontrovertible
philosophical arguments than in its seemingly brave and even heroic ethical
stance.

If
Taylor’s Secular Age seeks to loosen the grip that modern assumptions
have on contemporary minds, Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation
(2012) aims to demolish such assumptions altogether. A defense of the Catholic
tradition, Gregory’s book argues that modern science and secular politics have
not discredited any of the major claims of medieval theology. Rather, by the
time of the Enlightenment, the religious conflicts precipitated by the
Reformation merely made it seem that Christian revelation had been discredited.
Hoping to bypass bloody confessional disputes, Enlightenment thinkers turned to
natural theology. The God they found, however, was a poor imitation of the
transcendent God of scripture and the church. A distant “first cause,” the God
of the Enlightenment could easily be rendered superfluous by naturalistic
explanations. Thus, argues Gregory, the entire modern enterprise came to be
based on an erroneous conception of God and Christian revelation. The God that
modern scientists have allegedly dethroned is not the Christian God.

Gregory
goes beyond Taylor in insisting that the institutions of modern life are
radically arbitrary and coercive—and thus lacking legitimacy. It is no surprise
to Gregory that modernity’s founding principle of “reason alone”—itself a
response to the futility of Protestantism’s “scripture alone”—has led to
intellectual and religious dead ends. Gregory finds an emptiness at the heart
of modern public life. State power and consumer pleasures—not a substantive
vision of the good—bind modern liberal societies together. By contrast, Taylor
interprets the history of modernity as a complex ebb and flow of social,
cultural, and intellectual forces. A student of Hegel, Taylor is more inclined
than Gregory to learn from modern history—to acknowledge that the historical
process draws attention to truths that would otherwise not have been apparent.
Thus, while Gregory contends that modern religious tolerance represents a
fundamental betrayal of Jesus’ uncompromising moral message (of which the
Christian civilization of the Middle Ages is purportedly the logical outcome),
Taylor suggests that modernity has made clear the “radical unconditionality”
and otherness of the Gospel’s proclamation of human dignity in ways that a
Christian civilization could not (see Taylor 1999, 17).

Despite
these differences, Gregory and Taylor concur that modern Western culture has
unnecessarily closed itself off to transcendent sources of value. Contrary to
popular perception, the loss of such sources was not a simple “falling away” of
religious inheritances. Rather, it resulted from willful decisions to construe
reality in certain ways rather than others.

Few
recent books have explored the intellectual consequences of a secular framing
of reality more eloquently than Paul Griffiths’s Intellectual Appetite
(2009), a theological meditation on human knowing. The modern academy, suggests
Griffiths, speaks of knowledge and scholarship as if they were the objective,
detachable products of an impersonal process. According to Griffiths, such
language obscures the ways in which the modern research university is engaged
in a very old project—that of forming the inquirer’s “intellectual appetite.”
No less than ancient and medieval catechists, the modern university cultivates
in students and researchers habits of knowing. Not so long ago, the modern
university was committed to a Weberian vision of the scholarly life as an
ascetic calling. The relentless search for new and highly specialized empirical
knowledge required the researcher to sacrifice his personal need for meaning.
More recently, universities have become “aware that there is no unanimity
within their walls about what intellectual appetite is and how it should be formed”
(17).Despite this lack of consensus, or perhaps because of it, the
academy continues to socialize its inductees, encouraging them to value novelty
above wisdom and possessive careerism above shared wonder.

The
crucial distinction Griffiths draws is between studiousness, a patient
attention to objects through which divine beauty and goodness shine, and
curiosity, an insatiable lusting after empty spectacles. Griffiths argues that
the quest for novelty is ultimately nihilistic, since there can be nothing sui
generis in the created order. Paradoxically, the quest for novelty condemns
the scholar to tedious and futile repetition, whereas a humble, stuttering
witness to a given reality opens up onto wonders that are ever new. One of the
book’s most provocative chapters critiques modern notions of intellectual
property. Griffiths argues that intellectual objects cannot, by definition, be
owned, since, unlike material commodities, an intellectual good can be shared
with others without being diminished. The entire modern academic enterprise, he
suggests, operates under a regime of artificial scarcity.

In
critiquing “curiosity,” Griffiths may underestimate its value. To what extent
is the spirit of curiosity an inevitable product of economic specialization and
media saturation? To what extent has restless curiosity of the scientific
enterprise opened up new forms of human flourishing—including the ability of
millions of young men and women to pursue higher education? Is it possible to
return to a purely contemplative model of learning when the material benefits
of curiosity—of instrumentalized knowledge—are so readily apparent? Regardless
of the answers to these questions, Griffith rightly highlights the limitations
of knowing rooted exclusively in a quest for novelty and instrumental power.
The modern university’s production of knowledge is not and cannot be neutral,
since intellectual regimes inevitably promote particular intellectual
virtues—particular ways of cultivating the “intellectual appetites.”

If
this is true, then how are American educational institutions shaping young
people’s “desire to know”? Here, one can turn to Warren Nord’s Does God Make
a Difference? (2010), a book that sums up a career of rich reflection on
religion and education. According to Nord, contemporary secular education
stunts the intellectual development of its students by prohibiting a frank and
open discussion of religion in the classroom. A survey of textbooks in several
disciplines leads Nord to conclude that American classrooms arbitrarily exclude
religion from areas of study to which it is vitally relevant—history after
1700, science, politics, literature, and art. Such exclusion is not “neutral,”
nor is it a logical application of the Constitution, which simply prohibits the
state from endorsing or promoting any particular religion. Rather, such
exclusions reflect an active bias against religion—a laïcité that goes
far beyond a disestablishment of the churches.

Nord
defends the teaching of religion in public schools on secular, not spiritual,
grounds. Shallow introductions to religion, suggests Nord, trap students into
the present, leaving them unable to understand the vast majority of cultures,
befuddled by the beliefs of their neighbors, and inarticulate about the
weightiest existential and moral questions. An arbitrary exclusion of religion
from the curriculum inhibits self-reflection and leaves disciplinary
assumptions unchallenged: “Political scientists often assume that the truth is
to be found in the scientific method they employ rather than in the (normative)
ideological, philosophical, and political beliefs and values of the
politicians, voters, and writers they study—and, as a result, they don’t teach
students to think politically so much as they teach them to think scientifically
about politics” (211). The effect of all this is to lock students into an
exceptionally narrow and cramped mental space, to deprive them of the tools
they need to understand their world and flourish as reflective adults.

Other
studies suggest that the effects of such deprivation are quite pervasive.
According to Christian Smith’s Souls in Transition, a lack of
substantive religious reflection deprives young men and women of vital
resources they need to narrate their own experience. Drawing on interviews with
a wide range of young adults, the book reveals individuals groping, often
unsuccessfully, to understand their lives and their wider world. Many of
Smith’s interviewees protest, for instance, that they have “no regrets” for any
of their choices—a claim that departs substantially from Jewish and Christian
understandings of sin and offers few possibilities for developing complex moral
or communal narratives. Equally striking is the radically subjective approach
to religion found among the young adults interviewed. As Smith suggests, their
world consists entirely of individual experience and emotion—of isolated selves
trying to do what is “right for them” and to get along with one another
(41–52). The conclusion Smith draws is admonishing without being moralistic:
the culture offers young people poor resources for making sense of their lives.

Such
impoverishment does not necessarily indicate a declining influence of religion
on American public life. According to Smith, media claims that today’s young
adults are more “spiritual” but less “religious” than previous generations are
greatly exaggerated (295–96). Indeed, the strength of Smith’s book lies in its
“thick description” of religious vocabularies; it resists any simple analysis
of American religious culture. Nonetheless, it does hint at a broader failure:
“if communities of other adults who care about youth wish to nurture emerging
adult lives of purpose, meaning, and character—instead of confusion, drifting,
and shallowness—they will need to do better jobs of seriously engaging youth
from early on and not cut them adrift as they move through their teenage years”
(299).Absent such engagement, argues Smith, young adults will be
unable to understand, let alone resist, the individualistic and therapeutic
assumptions they absorb from the wider culture.

What,
then, is to be done? How can educators and parents promote a deeper and broader
engagement with questions of meaning? How can secular education do justice to
the full complexity the human experience, both past and present? How can
faculty model ways of knowing that go beyond the instrumental mastery of
disciplinary methodologies?

Confessing
History (2010)—a collection of essays exploring “the Christian faith
and the historian’s vocation”—argues that the way forward lies less in sweeping
institutional change than in the scholar’s quotidian callings as writer,
believer, teacher, citizen, and churchgoer. Together, the essays invite the
reader to ponder what it might look like to pursue a scholarly vocation with
well-formed intellectual appetites. The book’s autobiographical essays, for
instance, attest to the power of humility as an intellectual virtue. They
provide eloquent models of the “stuttering wonder” that Griffiths holds up as
the proper response to the mystery of creation. As Una M. Cadegan puts it in
her essay“Not All Autobiography is Scholarship: Thinking, as a
Catholic, about History,”

...mystery itself is not, in some sense, mysterious, if by
“mysterious” we mean something that tries to keep itself from us, keep us
guessing and stumbling. Instead, mystery is very near, always waiting to ambush
us, in the most mundane of our tasks, because we deal with the stuff of which
the gracious mystery at the heart of the world is made. (59)

Insofar
as it follows Jesus’ command to love God and one’s neighbor, the historian’s
calling is no different than that of other Christians. As Beth Barton Schweiger
writes in “Seeing Things: Knowledge and Love in History,” “Christian historians
should set aside the often unyielding standards of professional norms in order
to foster relationship with their peers, students, and the people in their
books” (76).

While
applauding the pioneering work of the generation of Christian historians that
came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s (George Marsden, Nathan Hatch, Mark
Noll, etc.), some of the essays in Confessing History imply that those
historians did not sufficiently challenge the assumptions of the historical
profession. Indeed, some contributions yearn for a more perfect—and allegedly
less accommodating—union of historical inquiry and Christian faith and
practice. William Katerberg, for instance, seeks to shift priority from “‘own
sake’ knowledge” to “loving intersubjective relationships.” In “The
‘Objectivity Question’ and the Historian’s Vocation,”
he urges the historian to seek “history in service of life,”
to acknowledge the “tradition-enacting, critical-memory function that history
(heritage) plays in the communities in which they live” (120, 117).Meanwhile, Christopher Shannon challenges the tyranny of the
monograph and argues that all history books (whether they acknowledge it or
not) are “morally charged narratives.” Most of what goes on in the academy,
argues Shannon in “After Monographs: A Critique of Christian Scholarship as
Professional Practice,” is little more than an ongoing attempt to legitimize
“the modern secular world” (183).Shannon
suggests that Christian historians might best challenge this legitimacy by
telling explicitly providentialist stories and by critiquing the equally
providentialist assumptions of secular monographs.

But
is such “postmodern” meta-reflection more likely to yield fruit than the
direct, vigorous engagement with the historical profession and the impressive
methodological rigor modeled by the monographs of Marsden and Noll? To follow
Simone Weil, are not patient, self-effacing habits of attention—habits that may
require years of training and the relinquishing of one’s own need for
meaning—also acts of love, even prayer? (1951, 105–116). History, after all,
offers abundant examples of the tragic, often unintended, consequences of
humanity’s urgent need for meaning—its use of “history in service of life.”

It
is not clear whether the calls in Confessing History for a more subjective
and “relational” history are any less an accommodation to trends within the
academy than the work of previous generations of Christian historians. As the
introduction explains, many of the contributors undertook graduate studies in
the mid-1990s—the moment when critiques of objectivity and Weberian rationality
were at their peak. Several of the essays raise now standard questions about
the secular modernity that informs the university, highlighting its hypocrisy,
its Eurocentricism, and its hegemonic instrumentality. Like Brad Gregory,
Shannon reminds us that the modern liberal experiment has a shoddy moral
record—that it has tolerated massive violence, exploitation, and alienation. In
this view, the very fact that the modern secular regime disavows or represses
its historically contingent foundations is evidence of an arrogated power.

Such
a monolithic depiction of the “modern secular world” offers too easy a target.
Modernity is a product of social, economic, and cultural transformations that
go far beyond intellectual moves made during the eighteenth century. And within
the modern world, the liberal Enlightenment has always been something of an
embattled faith. However, it is a faith that, to many, has had the voice of
moral authority—an authority based not on metaphysical or epistemological
certainty but rather on an awareness of the fallibility of human judgment, the
goodness of ordinary life, the dangers of political power, and the fragility of
flesh. At its best, the modern liberal tradition invites us to engage in acts
of moral sympathy, to imagine ourselves in the place of another. Within complex
systems of social and economic interdependence, the liberal tradition has
fostered awareness of the myriad and indirect ways that we are bound to our fellow
human beings—as well as the potentially disastrous ways that attempts to secure
personal meaning or communal belonging have deprived individuals of their
potential for flourishing.

Here,
Michael Kugler’s “Enlightenment History, Objectivity, and the Moral
Imagination” in Confessing History, a sensitive exploration of the moral
imagination of Enlightenment historians, works to counterbalance triumphalist
Christian readings of liberalism’s alleged failures. According to Kugler, the
Enlightenment moral imagination was exceptionally diverse; it ranged from the
Baron d’Holbach’s blunt atheism to Christian accounts of the moral sentiments.
But it was rooted in a critique of the dangers of “religious mastery”—“the
human tendency to turn worship and theology into mastery of talk about God and
of ourselves” (143).Though the liberal tradition has been too quick to see
theocrats lurking everywhere, its critique of “religious mastery” has
nonetheless uncovered new dimensions of Jesus’ message. To its vision of religious
tolerance we owe our ability to speak and write and think so freely. In seeking
to outflank the Enlightenment, do Christian scholars not risk the same bad
faith—the same elision of moral sources—of which they accuse the modern
academy?